Zen and the Art of Running by Larry Shapiro

Author:Larry Shapiro
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook, book
Publisher: Adams Media, Inc.
Published: 2009-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 5

TRAINING THE ZEN WAY

These days, or so it seems, for every good cause there is a race. In my hometown, hardly a week goes by when there isn’t an organized race to benefit nurses, firefighters, teachers, the homeless, literacy, AIDS or cancer patients, and so on. These are all worthy causes, and I am happy to spend money both to contribute to the relief efforts and to enhance the fulfillment that I usually feel after running ten kilometers. As well, long-distance runs that aren’t related to a cause have become very popular in recent years. For instance, in Madison alone there is an annual 20K race around one of our lakes, a twenty-mile race to celebrate Norwegian independence day, a marathon, a half marathon, and an Ironman (an endurance triathlon that culminates with a marathon). Within a three-hour drive, there are marathons and half marathons in Chicago, Milwaukee, the Fox Cities, Green Bay, and probably other places I don’t even know about. If you live in a city, you can probably relate. But regardless of where you live, a few minutes on the Internet will reveal numerous races, at all times of the year, within a few hours’ driving distance from your home. Obviously, the twenty-first century is a good one for runners!

RUNNING Tip

To find an organized run near you, check out www.active.com /running. Just enter a location in the search window and you’ll find links to nearby running events. You can use this site not just to find races near your home, but also to see whether any of your travels might be combined with a running event.

Whether you’ve been running for a while, or whether you’re a novice who has been cajoled, compelled, or coerced into running a race in support of the favorite cause of your spouse, boss, or parent, you’ll need to train to do it right. If you’ve never run, you cannot wake up on race day and hope to complete a distance of 10K, or, probably, even 5K. Similarly, if your longest distances have been 10K, you can’t possibly complete a marathon without further training.

A student in one of my classes once told me he was going to run a marathon the following weekend. He was eighteen and very fit from the soccer practices he’d been attending all semester. I asked him what his longest run had been to date and he told me it was ten miles. I held my tongue. Maybe he could do it? Eighteen-year-old bodies are capable of much more than forty-eight-year-old bodies, after all. The Monday following the marathon, there was no sign of him. On Wednesday he came limping into the classroom, still sore from the twenty miles of the marathon that he was able to run. To his credit, he finished the race, walking the final six miles. “Tougher than I thought it would be,” he mumbled after the lecture.

This chapter and the next focus on how to train the Zen way for various races in

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